


Of Exceeding Mercy

by SeriousMistakes (TruckThat)



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: AU, Angst, M/M, dub-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:49:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/SeriousMistakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurogane doesn’t sleep, but he tries never to go out after dark anymore, unless it’s on business.  He sees Fai anyway, more often than he’d like.  Tonight, though, Kurogane is ready for him.</p><p>AU written for a CLAMPkink prompt where Kurogane is an angel, Fai is a demon, and they don’t necessarily get along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Exceeding Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of those strange, forgotten WIPs destined never to see the light of anywhere, until I recently wrote an even stranger but somewhat less angsty sequel to this and decided I might as well throw ‘er out there. So JSYK, there’s definitely a Part 2. The original CLAMPkink prompt, which was already super old when I originally wrote this fic at least five hundred years ago, is in the endnote.
> 
> The non-con warning is serious. Kurogane is not very aware of his own feelings here, or anyone else’s.

Kurogane is waiting alone in a cathedral, in a suit and jacket that belong to no one in particular.  He doesn’t have wings today—he’s sick of them.  They’re not much more than a metaphor, anyway, and he’s tired of metaphors.

Kurogane has just finished killing someone, which is... about average, as these things go.  Not a bad night’s work.  It’s an uncomplicated case, tonight, the unusual part being that he’s already been out and beaten Fai fair-and-square at it.  Methodically hunted his target down probably before Fai even knew that there was anyone to track—an occurrence that’s been less and less common recently.  He’s worse than tired.  He feels like he’s slowly tearing apart.

Faith is all that there is of him, all that he was created with, and every time Kurogane moves, the ragged, invisible shards of it bite just a little bit worse somewhere deep in his chest.  He can feel his passion, his devotion—his love—cracked in half inside him.  His God has not abandoned him.  His God will _never_ abandon him.  But being an angel is a complicated business and his God will never even get the chance, because Kurogane has probably already abandoned himself.

He is a protector, an avenger, an angel of wrath.  His touch doesn’t heal; there is no benediction in it.  His touch ends.

The tempters, the dealers, the murderers, the ones who have already gone so wrong that no sweet, healing touch could save them anyway: these are the ones that Kurogane kills.  He doesn’t mind that.  He doesn't want to _save_ them; couldn't do it even if he did.  But through all of it, he belongs only to God.  No matter how much he kills, no matter how much he kind of likes the hunting and the fight of it, all he is supposed to be able to feel is love.  Not just his own love—everyone’s love.  All of it. 

He feels all the echoes of all the love in the world, without respite, whether that love is newfound and strong or half dead and crumbling.  And that—no part of what Kurogane is, is easy.  No matter who Kurogane kills or what they’ve done, someone always loves them.  Every life he ends (in the name of God, in defiance of Satan) leaves a tear—someone’s broken heart left behind like a snapped  thread.  All those loose ends drag at Kurogane like the sharp ends of a million rusty wires.  But he belongs to Heaven and he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t sleep.

Kurogane is tired, but tired is not the same thing as conflicted.

 

Kurogane is sitting awake in the silent dark because he chooses to; he is forgetting only the things he chooses to forget.  One of the perks of being a creature of Heaven is that he could blink and it would be morning, with the sun streaming in through the stained glass windows over his head.  One of the disadvantages is that he could blink and have it happen accidentally.  Not tonight, though—tonight he’s busy, waiting for Fai.

But he isn’t thinking about Fai.  He’s thinking about the husk of the dead man that’s sitting in the dark with him, about knocking on the man’s door without even an excuse prepared in case someone else had answered.  It wouldn’t have mattered.  And he’s thinking about the look in the dead man’s eyes, where it was possible, for a second, to read all of the things he had done and the things he would do.  So it is written and so shall it be; a list of certainties.  Those were the eyes, Kurogane knows, of a man who deserved to die.  They always are.

This is more than a professional opinion; it is his work, his whole calling, and his only purpose.

 

Kurogane doesn’t sleep because _good_ doesn’t sleep (because angels don’t sleep, because evil never sleeps either) but he tries never to go out after dark anymore, unless it’s on business.  He sees Fai anyway, more often than he’d like. 

Fai sits in sunlit cafes drinking black espresso with spoon after spoon of sugar in it.  He has golden, spun-sugar hair. Fai has ice-white wings, when he chooses to have them.  (Kurogane, who kills in cold blood and has blood-black feathers, has always wondered what the Hell kind of metaphor _that_ was.)  Fai will give his lunch to stray dogs in back alleys.  He’ll laugh in jazz joints, leaning back on the bar with his sleeves rolled up and his head tilted back like he shouldn’t be out so late without someone to protect him.  When somebody notices this—as Fai always perfectly well intends them to—Fai goes with them wherever they want, lets them do _whatever_ they want, and if they’re nasty enough, Fai kills them.

Just looking at them would be enough; Fai could let just the smallest flash of his true self show through and they’d die in an instant.  He could kill them with the touch of his smallest finger.  But Kurogane knows that he never does.  He’s gotten there too late, he’s seen Fai kill, and he knows that Fai always does it slow and messy.  With a kiss.  Fai is not an angel, and Fai kills with hate.

Fai is not a tempter, either.  Doesn’t need to be.  People do a good enough job of all that by themselves.  He hunts the same people that Kurogane does—kills the ones who have already damned themselves all on their own, with no need for help from Hell.  But Fai is not an angel, not at all, and where Kurogane kills to end it, Fai kills to _take_.  The souls that Fai gets to before Kurogane can snuff them out are the souls that live on to writhe in Hell.

More and more often, Kurogane is tempted to just not go.  To fold up around himself and see if he can’t learn to sleep after all.  Or to let the time run past him like water and vanish, they way it would if Kurogane wasn’t very careful to pay attention to that kind of thing.  If he doesn’t go out hunting, he can’t run into Fai—who sometimes smiles so bright and lazy and _false_ at him that it seems like Fai thinks maybe he could lure Kurogane out into the dark and have him, too.  If Kurogane doesn’t go...

Everyone who is supposed to die will still die anyway, the same hearts will still be broken and not by Kurogane’s hand.  The only difference is whether or not Hell gets to keep their souls.  More and more, that feels like a trivial distinction.

It’s this thought—this staggering, inconceivable fallacy—that is ripping Kurogane in half.

 

Kurogane knocked on his quarry’s door, looked him straight in the eyes, and laid a palm against the man’s forehead before the expression there could even change to a look of surprise.  And that’s how it ended.  How it ends.  Just Kurogane there, all alone with his new fistful of snapped strings.

Only.  Instead of leaving everything in a heap where it falls, tonight Kurogane drags the man’s empty shell down the street.  Instead of making this look like a natural death (heart attack, car crash, pneumonia, the state penitentiary and the electric chair; Kurogane can make it look like anything he wants and in a way they are _all_ natural, all inevitable deaths) he makes it look like this murderer walked out of his home under his own power, alive.  He hauls the husk through the cobbled streets with his own hands, thinking hard, and stops when the road dead-ends in a square with a cathedral.  Locked up tight, of course; it's after midnight.  This will work.

Kurogane props his load up in one of the pews near the back and makes the long walk up to the apse alone.  Sits down on the altar to wait.  A little bit of hallowed ground certainly won’t be enough to stop Fai, just enough to make him curious.  But Kurogane’s through with avoiding this particular servant of Hell and he’s counting on that fact.  He’ll wait alone in the dark for as long as it takes: he’s going to fight dirty.  He wants to _talk_. 

 

When the big doors creak open it’s Fai who walks in, dragging the streetlight from outside in with his long shadow, whistling.  Kurogane has been waiting for what feels like half a century—Fai is exactly as on time as he means to be, always, even when he doesn’t know he’s got an appointment.  The demon doesn’t make it very far into the cathedral before he sees the corpse that used to be his prey and breaks off mid-phrase, swearing lowly.  He strides across the aisle to take a pulse.  For a while, Fai stands frozen like that, two fingers on the carcass’ still throat and a shocked, almost sorry look on his face. 

“Demon,” Kurogane says, as quietly as he can; he needs Fai to notice him sitting there and come just ten steps closer.  Fai glances up and smirks.

“Oh, Kuro-pure, is this one your fault? It’s going to be suspicious when they find him dead in a church of all places.  Not the usual thing.”  Fai is looking up and around at the dark stained glass, not paying attention, but he walks slowly down the nave anyway.  “You know, I—”  He stops.  Jerks.  Makes kind of a hiccupping noise and then _changes_ , from the pretty, fey thing who walked in off the street into something made of dangerous angles.

 Kurogane knows the second Fai realizes what’s happened—that he’s been trapped—because Fai whips around to stare properly.  His eyes are wide and cat-slit, moonlit, all demon and no glamour left at all.  Shadows snag unnaturally on all of Fai’s edges and stay caught there when he moves.  “What in Hell’s name did you _do_?”  Fai licks at his lips like a snake, tasting the air for danger.  Then he shifts and stands purposely relaxed, looking thoughtful.  “What’s wrong with you?”

“Tch.” Kurogane takes a step forward. “Nothing’s wrong with me.  You know I live by the will of Heaven.”

“Mm-hmm.”  Fai should probably be afraid—Kurogane’s caught him in a trap so old he didn’t see it coming.  Got him so stripped of power that even his wings are showing, beyond his control.  He still doesn’t look very scared.  “And I can see that you, Kuro-saintly, have claimed yet another victory in the Saviour’s name.  But it doesn’t seem very heavenly to drag the poor man around like that after he’s dead.  Did you really want to see me so badly?”

“There is _nothing_ wrong.”

“Kuro-gone,” Fai says, voice suddenly flat and mouth a hard, watchful line, “you feel like dinner.  _My_ kind of dinner, all filled up with so much darkness I can taste it from over here.  That definitely means something is wrong.”

“I wanted to—” To talk. To ask.  It’s what he’d meant to do, when he’d laid an outline in holy water and prayed—with all the solemn faith of a servant of God who knows that his prayer will be answered— that this circle was a trap that could be sprung.  There’s no very great mystery in that power; all it takes is belief.  But now he has Fai pinned here in the dark with no one watching and he’s not so sure that talking’s what he wants at all.

Fai said _dinner_ , and Kurogane has been starving for a long, long time.

“I wanted to get you where you couldn’t slither out,” is what Kurogane settles on, moving carefully closer.  He steps fastidiously over the edge of his circle, even though it doesn’t matter now if he smudges it.  The power to keep Fai still won’t last past morning, but it’s seeped into the bones of the church for as long as it holds.

Fai gives him a narrow glare.  “I’d feel better about this if it wasn’t quite so obvious that you’re making it up as you go along, Kuro-seraph.”

“D’you want me to lie about it?”

“I—No.”  Fai swallows, finally uncertain.  It’s probably because Kurogane is inside the circle now, standing too close _not_ to be picking a fight.  The feeling of gaining control over this single, insignificant thing, over the tiny, off-balance shift in Fai’s stance, is an amazing relief. “I think, though... I’m getting the feeling, Kuro-push, that it might not matter what I want.”

“Yeah,” Kurogane just barely smiles at him, purely so that he can watch Fai gulp again, “it might not.”

 _Naked_ isn’t really a thing that matters.  But Fai is... completely bare.  Whatever he was wearing before must’ve been as much of a construction as the blue of his eyes.  Fai shifts a bit as if he’s thinking of using his wings to shield himself and Kurogane thinks, _not a chance_.  He reaches out and runs one finger along the most naked piece of skin he can find, the dip and the long plane of Fai’s sternum.

The thing about the wings is, the wings are sort of metaphorical, but that doesn’t mean they’re not also sort of real, and Fai’s are _huge_.  At that touch, they snap all the way open, fast, like he desperately wants to break loose, like he thinks he can take off and get out.  Of course—it doesn’t work at all.  All it does is yank them both off balance and leave Fai exposed.

Kurogane shoves him over backwards hard enough that Fai cracks his head against the end of a pew and then follows Fai down.  It’s not so easy to overpower a demon, but Kurogane is no lesser angel.  Instead of fighting back, Fai stays where he’s sprawled out, half-leaning against the pew with his wings crushed messily behind him, staring.  It has to hurt.  Kurogane is basically on top of him.  Fai’s knee is digging into Kurogane’s stomach through his shirt, a passive accident.  That does hurt.

“Tch.  You’re not even trying.”  Kurogane shoves Fai’s knee out of his gut.  “I thought you’d try to kill me.”

“Why would I?” Fai just _looks_ at him—not, apparently, angry in any way that Kurogane can understand—and spreads his legs so that Kurogane is fitted between them.  He waits there like that, as if for an answer.  Doesn’t move.  Maybe God knows what he’s waiting for but Kurogane doesn’t; so he waits, too.  Fai goes on, eventually, so soft that Kurogane has to make the conscious effort not to lean in.  “I can’t.  You’re no lost sheep to be culled, any more than I am.  You love your God even when your faith’s so ripped up I can practically see the holes.  What could I try, against all that?”

It's stupid; it’s never been Fai’s habit to converse in liturgy, or to converse in any kind of sense at all, for that matter.  But his words and the outstretched arc of him have the cadence of a prayer.  Kurogane doesn’t have time for that right now, not with one hand braced against the span of Fai’s chest and the other spread along his thigh in some parody of a saint’s tableau.  It must look like—well, it must look like exactly what it is.  No point in lying.  Kurogane’s an excellent liar when it’s necessary to be one, but lies certainly _are_ Fai’s habit.  He can taste an untruth without even trying.  Kurogane snatches his hands back to brace against the floor instead of Fai’s breathing heat, suddenly desperate to break the frozen scene.

No lost sheep, huh?  Maybe Fai has finally learned to lie so well that even Kurogane can’t tell.

With the stillness broken, Fai tilts his head back, very slowly and very obviously, and Kurogane can feel the curious, acquiescent nudge of his hips.  Arching up.  It’s a gesture of deliberate vulnerability that Kurogane recognizes from watching Fai hunt: baring his throat and spiking cold, grey longing straight through Kurogane’s gut.  A calculated trap.  Except Fai isn’t usually breathing so fast that Kurogane can see his throat stutter when he does it.

“It’s a little ironic, though,” Fai says, kind of choked, kind of rushing.  Apparently speaking to the ceiling vaults—so maybe he _is_ praying.  Before Kurogane can even consider pulling back, Fai is pulling him in.  Hard.

He’s hot, in a brimstone and flame sort of way, hot like a flesh and blood living thing.  Like a thing more alive with Kurogane’s touch than without it, no matter how much Kurogane doesn’t want it that way.  And Kurogane’s not pulling back either.  Kurogane could be naked against all of that heat if he wanted, could be naked right the Hell now just by wishing he was, but instead he uses the hand that’s trapped between them to unbuckle his own belt.  To take what he _does_ want, which is his dick against Fai’s, damning and mortal and stupid.

And it’s easy, and it’s terrifying.  The flagstones are cold against Kurogane’s knees even through the trousers he’s still wearing, rough against the palms of his hands where he doesn’t trust himself enough to lay hands on Fai again.  But underneath him, Fai _sears_.  Kurogane fully understands that one touch of all that pale, burning skin should have ended him.  Even without putting his hands on Fai, he can feel him, smell the hot caramel and ash scent of him, something he wants to swallow whole more than he’s wanted anything for a thousand years.

He bites into Fai’s skin, anywhere he can reach it, spelling out _save me, save me, save me_ in intentional bruises.  And Fai hangs there underneath him, caught, and lets him bruise.

If he moves too quickly, if he doesn’t linger long enough to taste, it’s on purpose.

He isn’t thinking of that burned-empty shell that used to be a man when he grinds down against Fai.  He’s thinking of Heaven and Hell and the way that Fai gasps and bucks _backwards_ , smashes his head against oak and limestone, when Kurogane slams his eyes closed and grinds his way inside.  Expends the last of his shattered control on this: on getting under Fai’s skin and inside Fai’s body without touching him at all with anything besides his cock.  It’s excruciating.  He isn’t sure which one of them he’s trying to hurt.  But Fai is too good, is making this too easy, hitching his hips and relaxing for Kurogane like he means it.  Like he wants it.  He’s hard, too, like he’ll take it _happily_.  Kurogane is thinking that probably, nothing mortal could have stayed alive for long enough for Fai to give them this good of a show.  And Kurogane doesn’t want to see it.  Doesn’t want to hear it.  Keeps his eyes closed and tries not to listen as if it’s someone else slamming Fai much too hard against the stones and holding him there.

Because Fai is begging, and he’s not begging Kurogane to stop.  All the perverts and rapists and serial killers and worse, and Fai never asks them to stop. He has Kurogane by the wrist and a fistful of the front of his hair, and he uses his grip to shove at Kurogane’s support so that he ends up sprawled full on top of Fai, chest-to-chest.  He yanks Kurogane forward by the fringe and never kisses him.  Just ducks his way under all of Kurogane’s missing defenses to press his mouth, open and hot and wet even through Kurogane’s shirt, right where Kurogane’s mortal heart would beat if he’d been someone Fai could kill.

Kurogane starts back in shock—looks back at Fai in a terrible mistake—and finds Fai staring up at him with wide-eyed, naked, desperately honest greed. “Oh,” Fai says.  “Oh my _God_ ,” he says, “ _please_.”

The words scald Kurogane’s skin but that doesn’t stop him from coming unstrung in one sharp jerk at just the scraping sound of Fai’s caught breath.  It’s the greed that does it, because Kurogane knows what it is to be greedy.  He knows what it is to hate, and to want, and to take.  He wishes that Fai was lying with his very breathing; he wishes he could run, now that he knows Fai’s not.  But it’s like all of his chafing knots have come untied at once, and the sudden release hurts worse than what was there before.

“No, don’t—” Fai starts when Kurogane pulls away, and he tugs at his fistful of Kurogane’s hair like that could stop him if he really meant to go.

But Kurogane doesn’t go.  He stays and finishes Fai off with his hands, with _both_ hands, wet with his own come.  Fingers sliding slick inside just to make Fai stop asking for it.  Spreading it everywhere because he wants Fai covered in it.  Fai’s cock and his stomach, and higher, Fai’s nipples, anywhere he can reach.   And this time when Fai shudders and _thrashes_ , wings and legs and pinfeathers everywhere, and finally stops breathing, only for a split instant—Kurogane somehow _is_ thinking of the dead man who’d stopped breathing exactly the same.  At the touch of Kurogane’s hand.  Then Fai is gasping again in winded gulps that even out too quickly, and Kurogane discovers that Fai’s skin under his mouth has no taste at all.  Not brimstone or sweetness or sin, not even his own semen, just nothing.

Kurogane kisses him anyway, not on the mouth but at the sharp edge of one clavicle and the hard line of his jaw and right there at the side of his brow.  In all the places for the benediction he can’t give.  He doesn’t think that Fai has blinked once, the entire time.

Fai lies unbelievably, horrifyingly still underneath him.  Just letting him; just waiting.  But then, he’s trapped—there’s nowhere he could try to go.

Kurogane stretches out beside him and waits too, watching darker shadows shift against lighter ones in the ceiling vaults.  As long as he lies there, waiting for nothing, he won’t have to stand up and examine what they’ve just done.  Or, what Kurogane has just done; Kurogane alone.  After a while, Fai stirs and Kurogane can feel him looking.  Someone should probably say something. What Kurogane ends up saying is, “I hate it.”

“Hate?”  Fai leans into his field of vision, pensively propping himself up half on top of Kurogane’s clothed chest as if this is how he ordinarily holds his conversations.  Close like this.  He doesn’t seem to need to ask what Kurogane is talking about, just stares out into the empty rows of pews, mulling.  Maybe, after all, he was only waiting to see what Kurogane had to say.  Kurogane wonders what guilt tastes like, if it tastes the same a lie, but his allegiance is now and has always been to Heaven. _Guilty_ is another one of the things that angels never are, right up there with mortal and damned.  “That’s a pretty strong word, you know,” Fai muses. “When it’s coming from a big, strong thing like you.”

“I can hate.”  It’s true, too.

“Hmm. I suppose you’re right.  And so you hate it.  Why? Because you don’t want to leave them alone to die?  Because you believe that maybe someone still wants them? Oh, Kuro-soft.” Fai’s bright copper-gold eyes are sad behind his still expression.  That’s more of a surprise than anything has been for the last hundred years.  Almost.  As if he’s been caught out, Fai butts his nose against the place where Kurogane’s collar has fought itself loose and left undefended skin at his throat.  It serves to hide Fai’s face again; the only possible motive.  “But you’ve been in this business almost as long as I have.  Those ones—they’re always alone.”

Kurogane doesn’t feel like arguing the point, so he asks, “What’s it for?”

“What’s what for?” He can feel Fai’s breath against his collar when he speaks.  Too close; it’s distracting.

“All the souls you take.  What does Hell even want them for?”

“I wonder,” Fai says and hesitates.  He sighs.  “I don’t know either, Kuro-pin.  It’s not something you just _ask_.  What does your side do with the good ones?”

Kurogane has never thought about it like that before, like there was another side and not just an opposing force.  It’s strangely discomfiting.  “Nothing.”

“What, really?” Fai laughs, sudden and honestly surprised.  “Nothing at all?”

“Well.”  It’s one more thing that Kurogane isn’t sure of tonight, is what it is.  He scowls. “No?  They just lounge around up there eating grapes and fucking like rabbits, last time I checked.”

Fai rolls over to laugh up at the ceiling instead of down at Kurogane.  He doesn’t have an entirely _kind_ laugh.  “I guess I always assumed it was some kind of—Almighty army, or something.  Like Heaven was always preparing for the day when you’d flap down and take over Hell, too, and leave us out in the cold.  Sometimes I think that’s what all those damned souls we keep lying around must be for, like reinforcements.  Just in case.”

“Just in _case_?”

“Well, that and because they’re repulsive moral reprobates who’re tearing everything apart for the people who are still alive and therefore they deserve to burn and rot eternally, obviously.  Lucifer’s probably been alone too long; I’m sure the whole pit of fire thing is just because he thinks it’s funny to watch them try to escape.” He waves a lazily expansive hand, like he’s indicating vastness of the pit in question.  “Just the brimstone would do it, really.”

Kurogane has never heard anything less funny in his life.  But Fai is not a lesser demon any more than Kurogane is a lesser angel.  Fai isn’t— “Do _you_ think it’s funny?”

“What kind of question is that, Kuro-terse?”

“A serious one.  Do you think that it’s funny to watch them suffer?”

“Ah.  No.” It’s not Fai who answers; it’s the unfathomable servant of Hell, serious as demanded. “It’s not funny at all.  But it is, very possibly, just.” He slants a slit-eyed glance at Kurogane.  “You don’t know hatred the way I do, though I know you can feel it.  But I _am_ hatred, when you boil me down: designed to hunt down those who have filled themselves so full of malice that they no longer deserve to live, and to hate them back in kind.  I like people in general, you know.  I can even love them, as much as you can hate.  But the ones I kill—are the ones who deserve not just to die but to die screaming.  So.  It really isn’t very entertaining.”

He keeps staring at Kurogane unsmilingly for long enough that his eyes slide back to everyday, human blue, and Kurogane still has nothing to say.  If Fai can pull his glamours back up, the trap is wearing thin.

“But I know why you can’t wish that on them,” Fai goes on, softened, like he’d never paused.  “You kill them without hating them, just to stop them from being, because that is what is right and what’s necessary to protect others.  You can’t want them to suffer.  Not because you cannot hate, but because you cannot wish the suffering of that fate on the ones who love them.”

Kurogane gapes, and Fai smiles again with all the flickers of Hellfire in his perfectly ordinary eyes.

“Don’t panic, Kuro-squish; I don’t _agree_ with you.  I’m just saying, I understand you.  I won’t start killing clean and put you out of business.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me, demon?”

“Of course not.”  That smile spreads into a terrible grin.  Fai has very sharp teeth—teeth that he didn’t use against Kurogane even once.  “Just—don’t forget to hate me, hmm?”

He stands, and the motion pulls Fai’s aura back around him in a metaphorical cloak and a literal jacket so that by the time he’s on his feet, he’s completely dressed and unaffected.  His wings are nowhere again; they’ve been gone for a while, maybe.  The pinstripe trousers he’s wearing didn’t exist five seconds ago, but they’re softening out of their perfect creases just a bit like Fai’s been wearing them all day at the office.  He looks human.  The least dangerous human in the world and a little on the skinny side, except that the moonlight dyes Fai grey instead of gilt.  Kurogane stares up at him from flat on his back and wonders why that is, when the light is dripping silver everywhere else, over all that grey stone.  He wonders how it’s so close to dawn already; if Fai pushed the time past faster just to get it over with, or if Kurogane did, or if they’d both just lost their grip.

Fai doesn’t look back even once when he steps over Kurogane’s legs and walks out the door, doesn’t look to the side at the hulk of the man he’d come for, and his feet don’t echo at all on the cathedral floor.

**Author's Note:**

> Written (literally years after the fact) for the following CLAMPkink prompt:  
> “KuroFai - Kuro is an angel/kami and Fai a devil/some kind of dark sprite (can be seriously religious or in a comedic universe). They often clash because of works. One day Kuro manages to trick Fai into entering a church or some sacred sanctuary where Fai is rendered powerless and Kuro has his way with him.”
> 
> Title is (a popular misquote) from John Bunyan’s _Grace Abounding_. Pretty sure he’d be mad, though.


End file.
